Friday, August 22, 2014

REVIEW 286: MARDAANI

It’s been a long long time since I’ve watched a Hindi
film in a hall where all the women in the audience clapped – several times. They
did this today not for a bizarre, unrealistic gang of rape victims on a rampage,
castrating rapists as Dimple Kapadia & Co did in 1988’s Zakhmi Aurat. Today they applauded a
believable woman police officer whose fisticuffs are a far cry from the
fantastical dishum-dishum of Bajirao
Singham in Singham Returns; a woman who
looks like she may well exist in a police station near our homes.

Rani Mukerji plays Mumbai Crime Branch Senior
Inspector Shivani Shivaji Roy in Pradeep Sarkar’s Mardaani. Hate the title, but let’s discuss that later. When a
street kid she’s fond of is netted in a sex trafficking racket, Shivani
goes after the gang and its intriguing kingpin. This is a sociological crime
thriller atypical of Bollywood: shorn of frills, straight-laced, to the point.

Shivani doesn’t fit any social or Bollywood stereotypes,
unless you count the film’s awful name. She’s smart, assertive, pretty, has an unconventional
family, is friendly with her juniors yet very much in charge, committed to her
work yet not obsessive to the exclusion of all else. She’s fun, she’s sexy, she
doesn’t hesitate to bash up bad guys, and she’s not exactly a saint when it
comes to the law. I kept waiting for a lazy and trite bow to commercial
compulsions with a suddenly glammed-up Shivani in a nightclub, under the
pretext of an undercover operation, while an ‘item song’ with a scantily clad
female dancer played in the background. No such scene came up.

So the film is consistent in tone until that last
scene in which Shivani delivers an unnecessary sermon to the central villain
and offers that dreadful, completely superfluous statement to us as a solution
to sexual violence: “Apne andar chhupee
mardaani har aurat, har bachchi ko dhoondna hai (Every woman, every girl
must find the man/manliness/masculinity hidden within her).”

The unmistakable reference is to this line in Subhadrakumari
Chauhan’s Hindi poem on Rani Laxmibai: “…Khoob
ladi mardaani / woh toh Jhansi waali Rani thhi (She who fought like a man,
she was the Queen of Jhansi).” That verse could perhaps be forgiven for equating
valour with manliness, since it was written in the early 1900s. Decades later, sycophantic,
sexist Indian netas were still
adjectivising “man” as a synonym for “decisive” and “brave”. Indira Gandhi was
“the only man in her Cabinet”, they said. Israel’s Golda Meir and Britain’s Margaret
Thatcher had already earned similar epithets. What a shame that Indian language is still so regressive and gender insensitive, that a film
on a gutsy woman police officer is titled Mardaani.

Sarkar’s gender politics is confusing. His Lalita
in Parineeta (2005) defied norms.
Pinky in Lafangey Parindey (2010) was
fiercely independent. In between came Laaga Chunari Mein
Daag (LCMD) bearing the absurd
lesson that a woman alone in the big bad city has no choice but to turn to prostitution
to earn a living. Everything except the title of Mardaani and that last sentence from Shivani are a complete
departure from LCMD’s inexplicable
medievalism.

That’s the only daag on this otherwise excellent film, which provides a
well-deserved platform to one of Bollywood’s best actresses. Rani is pitch
perfect as Shivani. She also looks sweet with barely any makeup on. She gets
the physicality just right, looking fit, like a fit woman would be, and is delightful
in those thoroughly un-Singham-like
action and fight scenes. Good job, girl!

Backing her are wonderfully natural supporting actors
in well-written roles. The most unusual character of the lot is the trafficking
boss who possesses neither the complexion nor the looks, language or demeanour typically
associated with Bollywood gangsters. This Hindi-English-speaking Hindu College
dropout is the kind of chap who could be your neighbour or mine. He’s played by
the lovely Tahir Bhasin who was noticeable even in Abhay Deol’s dismal
production One By Twoearlier this
year, so you can imagine how he shines in this sparkling film.

Mardaani’s clean writing by
Gopi Puthran is complemented by cinematographer Artur Zurawski and editor
Sanjib Datta’s no-fuss work. Together with Sarkar, they manage to portray the
sexual exploitation of girls without being exploitative themselves. Except for
that final song, the use of music is minimal, which is well suited to the tenor
of the film. The sharp dialogues are rarely melodramatic. There’s some
interesting referencing of religion (a muezzin’s call at an interesting point) and
popular culture (watch out, Breaking Bad
fans). Also neat is the way Delhi NCR has been woven into the scenario, with a
Gurgaon multiplex, the Metro, the Hanuman statue at Jhandewalan and our newest
landmark, that striking gigantic Tiranga in CP set up by industrialist Naveen
Jindal’s Flag Foundation, distinguishing the Capital from Mumbai where the
story first takes off. No cliched shots of India Gate and Rajpath as is the
wont of most Hindi films.

Let’s pretend we didn’t hear that last line and
that they called the film something else. After Kangna Ranaut’s Queen, here comes Rani The Action Queen.
This has been a good year for proving that women-centric films can be fun. “Kadam
milaake dekho toh / Main saath mein tere chal doongi / Par chhed ke dekho tum
mujhko / Main tumko nahi chhodoongi,” goes the song playing in the background in the final scene. It’s
more dramatic than the rest of the film, butafter years of watching Salman, Ajay
& Co mindlessly bashing up baddies in an often enjoyable but always unrealistic
fashion, I confess I had a rollicking good time seeing a woman grind her foot
into a creep’s groin in a far more probable fashion. Mardaani strikes that delicate and hard-to-achieve balance between
realism and entertainment. Very very nice, Mr
Sarkar.

1 comment:

At the time of composition of the SUBHAĎŔA CHAUHANA poes were in Hindosrani language/dialect easily understood by illiterate Bundelas and other parts of the country. Those were the days of "Patriotism.". The spread or use of this word has become, Friends as anti SICKULAR?

About Me

Anna MM Vetticad is an award-winning journalist, journalism teacher and author of the critically acclaimed bestseller The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic, an overview of the Hindi film industry presented through an account of a year in which she watched every single Bollywood film released in India’s National Capital Region. A journalist since 1994, she has worked with India Today, The Indian Express and Headlines Today. At HT she hosted her own interview show Star Trek which drew all India’s eminent entertainment personalities. While Anna has spent most of her career as a behind-the-scenes editorial person, she has also reported on most major Indian entertainment and lifestyle events and several international ones including Cannes and the Oscars, in addition to being the film critic for Headlines Today. She is currently reporting and writing for multiple publications on cinema and social issues with a focus on gender concerns. The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic is available on amazon.com, ebay.in, flipkart.com, ombooksinternational.com, ombooks.com, infibeam.com, homeshop18.com and dialabook.in among other websites, and in stores across India. Twitter: @annavetticad